Free message ignored plan for jails, sentences

By: Alan Coxwell Stirling, The Intelligencer

 

What an extreme pleasure it was to receive yet another postage-free, feel-good message from our Hastings & Prince Edward Member of Parliament in my rural mailbox last week.

 

In his two-page note Daryl Kramp told me "Conservatives Standing Up for Canadian Consumers" is what his government has been doing up on Parliament Hill during these dog days of the summer of 2010.

 

Featured prominently was a smiling, 30- something couple heading back to their car in a mall parking lot with a couple of kids in an otherwise empty shopping cart.

 

However, I must say I was disappointed because the same message was repeated on both sides of Daryl's flyer. On the back Mr. Kramp could have used the space we taxpayers paid for to explain to us why his government will be spending $9.5 billion of our tax dollars to build new prisons to incarcerate more Canadians despite the fact crime statistics in Canada have been downtrending for the past couple of decades.

 

We all listened intently as Stockwell Day explained we needed more prisons because there was a huge number of "unreported crimes." When asked exactly how Stockwell knows this, since crimes which are unreported leave no statistical database, Stockwell went off into his never-neverland of mind-numbing political drivel.

 

Mr. Kramp could also have used the space to explain to us why his Conservative cohorts are simultaneously closing down all of Canada's prison farms where prisoners work at growing their own food, while getting exercise out in the sunshine and learning useful skills to help them when they are eventually reintroduced into our society.

 

Personally, I suspect the answer to all of these mysterious moves lies in Bill S-10. It started life under the Harperites way back in 2007 as Bill C-26 before being shelved because of the 2008 election. It was reintroduced as Bill C-15 which redefined what was a "serious crime", lengthened prison sentences and established a mandatory nine-month prison sentence for anyone caught growing from five to 200 marijuana plants.

 

The Liberal-dominated Senate amended C-15 to drop those mandatory sentences but Harper prorogued Parliament before the Queen could give Royal Assent to the amended version.

 

After proroguing Parliament Harper slid five more loyal Conservatives into Senate seats. Harper now believes he can get his Bill S-10 passed unamended, build new prisons and fill them up.

 

After 28 months as a guest of the U.S. justice system Conrad Black has a special insight which he shared with readers of the Globe & Mail last week. He spoke of seeing "the failure of the U.S. War on Drugs, with absurd sentences. A trillion dollars have been spent by U.S. authorities but the only result has been illegal substances in question being more available and of better quality than ever, while producing countries such as Columbia and Mexico are in a state of civil war."

 

Is this the road to our future Daryl and Stephen really want to take us down? We know Stephen disappointed his conservative voting base when he failed to come through on his pledge to stop gay marriages but do we need to spend billions of dollars locking Canadians in prisons for something which should not even be a criminal offense, much less carry a mandatory nine months in jail, just to please that disappointed minority?

 

Look to California, Daryl. They are voting in November to totally legalize cannabis. Its medical benefits are not in question. Unlike alcohol, cannabis has never killed anyone.

 

Please, do not build those prisons to lock our kids up in.

 

Alan Coxwell Stirling

 

Ed. note: Alan Coxwell was the candidate for the Green Party in the last federal election